Episode 15: Integrating Today’s Forces for Air and Missile Defence

Many modern defence reviews focus on the need for integration. Arguably, nowhere is the need more important today than in providing air and missile defence. State and non-state adversaries have shown varying abilities to combine their attacks in ways that pose multiple dilemmas.

Using small, slow-moving and low flying drones intended to swamp defences, coordinated with aircraft and cruise, hypersonic and ballistic missiles, these packages present huge challenges across a wide span of heights, speeds and trajectories. As well as being a problem for fielded forces, it is an industrial challenge in making sure there are enough interceptors at the right price point to sustain the defences.

In this episode, RAdm Macy USN (Retd) offers his unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities based on his time in the Aegis Program Office and most recently as the Director of the Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense Organization in the US Joint Staff.

David C. Gompert, Preparing Military Forces for Integrated Operations in the Face of Uncertainty, RAND 2003, available at: https://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP250.html

John Nisser, Integration is the New Black: Thoughts on Future Warfare in Academic and Military Discourses, Scandinavian Journal of Military Studies, Vol.5(1), 2022, pp.398-411, available at: https://sjms.nu/articles/10.31374/sjms.169.

Paul O’Neill, ‘In a Competitive Era, Look Beyond Integration Towards Adaptability’, RUSI Journal Vol.166(2), 2021, pp.30-39, available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03071847.2021.1927818